Who Invented the Microwave Oven |
 Dr. Percy Spencer,Who Invented the Microwave Oven |
He noticed that the candy bar in his pocket had melted all of a sudden and without any real reason, the only possible cause was the magnetron. This led Doctor Spencer to start experimenting with the tube’s capabilities and thought of placing popcorn kernels near it to see the result. To his amazement he watched how the kernels cracked and started popping all over his desk and lab.
The phenomenon was definitely intriguing but his first experiments were hardly enough to allow him to come to a conclusion so he devised yet another experiment to test the magnetron’s power, this time with an egg. He placed the egg near the vacuum tube and then watched it starting to shake and then after a short while it exploded all over Doctor Spencer’s visiting colleague that happened to be there to observe the phenomenon for himself.
This was the experiment that clinched it in Spencer’s mind the phenomenon he witnessed was all due to the fact that the candy-bar, the popcorn kernels and the egg were exposed to low-density microwave energy.
Now that he had a basic understanding of why this was happening he could start developing a way of harnessing the phenomenon better by placing the magnetron in a metal box thus not allowing the microwave energy to escape, thus creating a much higher density electromagnetic field to experiment with. He was in fact building the first microwave oven prototype, the very first ancestor of every make and model we see today.
The jump from the principle to the drawing board and then to the first commercial microwave was stunningly quick, by 1946 the Raytheon Company had filed their microwave oven proposal and then by next year the first commercial microwave was on the market.
However these first units were huge, heavy and incredibly expensive; the first microwave ovens weighted around 750 pounds or 340 kilograms, stood 5 1/2 tall or 1.67 meters and cost about five thousand dollars each. Added to this the fact that the magnetron tube back then needed to be cooled with water hence some plumbing was required as an extra expense.
Nobody was surprised by the fact that these monoliths did not sell very well, but the technology definitely showed promise and not before long new advances meant that microwave ovens started becoming smaller, lighter, less expensive, and with the help of the air-cooled magnetron there wasn’t any need for plumbers anymore.
Fast forward a couple of decades and by the middle of the seventies microwave ovens started selling more than gas ovens. This was due to the fact that technological advances allowed for the microwave oven to constantly diminish in size, weight and cost as well as gain new features and options such as convection heat, probe and sensor cooking and many others.
Nowadays the microwave oven has a firm control on the whole world’s cooking habits, cutting time and energy expenditure and allowing us to enjoy our warm food in record time.
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